


You Could Achieve So Much (If You'd Just Apply Yourself)

by lemonsharks



Category: The Adventure Zone (Podcast), The Adventure Zone: Amnesty - Fandom
Genre: Aubrey Little Has ADHD, Aubrey Little cannot help but save people, Character Study, Field Trip, Gen, High School, Pets, Pre-Canon, fire imagery, it's in her nature
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-01
Updated: 2020-01-01
Packaged: 2021-01-23 21:41:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,152
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21327124
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lemonsharks/pseuds/lemonsharks
Summary: Aubrey Little's very first crime is technically a petty theft, but she likes to think of it as a highly strategic and very important kidnapping.
Comments: 4
Kudos: 30
Collections: Yuletide 2019





	You Could Achieve So Much (If You'd Just Apply Yourself)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [pugglemuggle](https://archiveofourown.org/users/pugglemuggle/gifts).

> Content notes at the end. (Animal things, poverty things).

The world has a lot (a lot) of things wrong with it. Wars. Homework. Her friends’ parents losing their jobs.

The sign some heretofore unknown jerk taped to the wall above her desk that says “Audrey knows.” (And really, if they’re going to make fun of her for being a knowitall teacher’s pet, then they can at least get her name _name_ right.) There are _too_ many things wrong in the world to keep track of them all, and sometimes they flicker and flash in Aubrey’s mind at night a school of sardines, bright and dark and light as caught in the wind. 

And she can’t catch hold of a single one of them to _fix_ it. 

Right now, in this very minute, at the Landis Pharmaceutical Laboratory in Morgantown, West Virginia, Aubrey Little is _consumed_ with single-minded focus. 

She has romanian electronic dance music she found on CD at a garage sale on her iPod and a rescue mission writ very very big inside her heart. Aubrey takes a long, warming breath before she taps her chemistry teacher on the elbow, one earbud swinging gently at her side. 

_Absolutely confidence is required to separate from the group_.

“Mr. Finch,” she says, and he turns and nods. She wishes she could pull off a better blush, but it is what it is. 

“Hm?” Mr. Finch, who’s about six and a half feet tall, lowers his head to listen to her with his good ear. 

“I really, um, need to pee? Can I meet y’all in the cafeteria?”

They go through what feels like a forty-minute long can _can you hold it until we get there_ conversation, because the lab campus is big and the work they do is super secretive and even getting the tour group here in the first place took some serious finagling. She debates which bodily fluid is most likely to get her a free sprint back to the alleged bathroom away from the rest of their tour group. _Gonna have to break out the big guns_.

“Sweet Jesus’ shit this is embarrassing--Mr. Finch, I, um,” her cheeks are _burning up_ and she’s gonna catch the backdraft for this one for _weeks_. Aubrey hisses, “--I’m gonna _bleed_ through my _pants_ if I--.” 

He gets her their chaperone’s staff badge and some directions. 

* * *

So here’s the thing: Her best friend’s mom pays them a basket of garden-fresh produce every two weeks in the summer and ten jars of blackberry jam in the fall to fill barrels of drinking water from her family’s tap. The Littles’ have a fancypants filtration system from before her mom stopped talking to her grandma, which makes it _old_ old, since Aubrey's never actually met her grandma. The Parsons’ water comes out smelling like sulfur and the chemicals they use mining coal. 

Michael Rhodes, who took her to homecoming sophomore year, quit school over winter break because of his dad’s lung cancer--and nobody’s paying for him to get better, since he lost his job right when he was starting to get sick. 

And even though everyone at the lab’s really nice, she’s caught accented voices talking here and there about how they can’t believe they landed in _Morgantown_, how they wish they were _anywhere_ else, and their coastal snobbery _burns_. 

And, okay, stealing is wrong and against the commandments and all that stuff, and she’s gonna be in a heap of trouble when she gets home. She can read the consequences coming like she’s living in a shoot-the-dog kind of book. _This is a terrible idea,_ rolls sing-song through her head, and all the ways her plan could backfire are just _that_ far out of her reach. 

Landis does good work. 

They make the kind of cancer drugs that could have saved Michael’s father’s life and let him stay in school, if they could afford the treatments. 

They can’t. 

Nobody on this damn tour can. 

And they met the rats and baby bunnies that are gonna die in toxicity testing, which Ellen Brown called _a little grim_, to a nervous laugh about two hours ago. 

Aubrey backtracks through the lab, beeping her clearance at every door that demands it and not thinking too hard about surveillance cameras, until she gets back to the animal-care room and the tank with the biggest baby bunnies she’s ever seen. She can’t save them all, she might even have to give the one back, but--. (But, but but, freezing here won’t do anyone any good, even with a choice as big as the one before her here, right now.)

It _hurts_, it’s something in between her lungs is getting crushed, and she doesn’t know how much time passes before she scoops up a red-eyed, big-eared ball of white fur exactly like all the other red-eyed, big-eared, balls of white fur and shoves it in her backpack. 

Later, Aubrey will learn that rabbits such as Dr. Harris Bonkers, PhD, can cost upwards of three _hundred_ dollars per animal. Later, after she’s been grounded for the rest of her life, after her mom has apologized and called her old family lawyer for a favor they can only sort of maybe afford, after she’s tucked her hand into her backpack and stroked her new friend’s soft head and had him nibble at her fingers and make soft chrrp sounds on the bus ride home. 

After she abandons the original plan, to set the bunny free in her family’s big back yard to face nature and all it might bring with it.

After she’s rejoined the rest of her group in the cafeteria, at the end of lunch and handed the key card back to their employee guide,. After she grabs a paper box full of lettuce and baby carrots from the salad bar. After she fills two tiny plastic-lidded cups with ranch dressing so she doesn’t look suspicious and tucks them inside the water bottle pocket of her backpack, away from the rest of her salad.

Years later, when she comes home to the lodge, scorched with her own magic and smelling of bom bom tar, she will tell Dr. Harris Bonkers that he’s worth so much more than the three hundred dollars Landis paid for him.

* * *

Right now, though, she stands entranced by the rest of the bunnies. What she’s doing is right, she knows. It’s right and she has to do it _because_ it’s right. But it’s not enough, not for her and not at all for them. “I’m so, so sorry,” she tells the litter. “I’m so sorry. Good luck. Good luck.”

She thinks, just for a minute, that one of the bunnies winks at her, but the thought flies right out of her head when the one in her backpack kicks her in the kidney.

* * *

Aubrey Little’s very first crime is technically petty theft, but she thinks of it as a highly strategic and very important kidnapping. 

**Author's Note:**

> Content Note - Aubrey stole Dr Bonkers from a scientific research lab of some variety, and this story deals with that. I tried to give the other bunnies a fighting chance, though. Also, poverty and community in semi-rural-to-rural West Virginia. 
> 
> Bunny dingbat from [www.flaticon.com](https://www.flaticon.com/)


End file.
